Elections | Equality by lot

Donald McCabe: Choose House by Lot

Posted on July 3, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Choose House by Lot

Published by The New York Times: March 15, 1991

To the Editor:

In “Expanded Congress Would Help Women” (letter, Feb. 24), Prof. Wilma Rule suggests a complicated scheme for the selection of members of the House of Representatives so that women and minorities may be fairly represented. As I understand the methods she recommends, however, there is no guarantee of any such effect. In any case, she ignores a simple means of choosing Representatives that would have the desirable results she wants, as well as others.

If members of the House were chosen by lot, instead of being elected (with still only one member for each district), the laws of statistics would assure that every part of our population would be represented very nearly proportionally. In addition, veto power over legislation would belong to a body that was not composed of professional politicians, who would have no interest in being re-elected and would therefore be subject to limited influence.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

I pester George Monbiot once more

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Yoram Gat

About a year ago I wrote to George Monbiot about sortition. At the risk of becoming a nuisance, I have just written to him again:

Again, sortition

Dear George,

Having just read your article “An Ounce of Hope is Worth a Ton of Despair”, I feel compelled to write to you again about a subject I have written to you about before: sortition.

As you may remember, sortition is the democratic alternative to elections. Instead of choosing decision makers by voting – which inevitably leads to having decisions made by members of an ambitious and well resourced elite – why not select decisions makers as a statistical sample of the population? Why not put some of those people who “consistently hold concern for others, tolerance, kindness and thinking for themselves to be more important than wealth, image and power” in a position where they can set policy instead of forcing them to choose between members of a self-serving elite?
Continue reading →

Filed under: Action, Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Alex Guerrero: Against Elections

Posted on June 13, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Alex Guerrero has a new paper forthcoming: “Against Elections: The lottocratic alternative”.

The paper begins as follows:

It is widely accepted that electoral representative democracy is better — along a number of different normative dimensions — than any other alternative lawmaking political arrangement. It is not typically seen as much of a competition: it is also widely accepted that the only legitimate alternative to electoral representative democracy is some form of direct democracy, but direct democracy — we are told — would lead to bad policy. This article makes the case that there is a legitimate alternative system — one that uses lotteries, not elections, to select political officials — that would be better than electoral representative democracy.

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | 17 Comments »

Dahl: Is Minority Domination Inevitable?

Posted on June 10, 2014 by keithsutherland

In most of the sciences – whether human, social or natural – there is a symbiotic relationship between theoretical and quantitative approaches. Einstein would not have formulated the theory of special relativity had the Michelson-Morley experiment confirmed the existence of the aether wind. The academic study of politics, however, bucks this trend as theorists and political scientists rarely talk to each other. This is primarily because the term ‘political theory’ is generally preceded by the adjective ‘normative’, so a conversation between theorists and polsci professors might well be seen as a contravention of the naturalistic fallacy.

This is self-evidently the case in the field of social theory, dominated by the long shadow of Rawls and still dedicated to the study of ‘57 varieties of luck egalitarianism’ (Waldron, 2013, p. 21). But why should it apply to democratic theory? – common-sense would dictate this should be a combination of normative and descriptive work, as most modern poleis claim to be democracies. Yet the upgrade panel for my own PhD (on representation and sortition) advised me to choose between the theoretical and empirical literature and not to seek to reconcile the two. The recent thread on this blog discussing Gilens and Page’s claim to have disproved the median voter theorem is a good indication of the sharp divide between the two literatures.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Theory | 26 Comments »

Manuel Arriaga: Rebooting Democracy

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Yoram Gat

A review of Manuel Arriaga’s Rebooting Democracy: a citizen’s guide to reinventing politics

Rebooting Democracy is a short and enjoyable book (available at Amazon; the first 50 pages are available online). Its introduction explicitly positions it as being motivated by the sentiments of the Occupy protests and the author’s proposals as responding to those sentiments. Like the Occupy protests Arriaga’s message is to a considerable extent anti-electoral:

[V]oting out one politician or party to bring in a different one will not solve our problems. Time has made it clear that this is not merely an issue of casting. If the play stinks, replacing the actors will not make it any better.

The first two chapters present an explanation of why the Western electoral system does not serve “us”. Arriaga summarizes his explanation with the following two points:

1) We have delegated power to the political class and hardly supervise it.

2) As voters, we are condemned to unreflective and easy-to-influence decision-making. Even if we were inclined to effectively supervise politicians, this would severely limit our ability to do so.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Books, Elections, Initiatives, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: citizen deliberation, citizen juries, democracy, elections, electoral system, Manuel Arriaga, Occupy, OWS, reform, sortition | 27 Comments »

Presidential Selection by Lottery?

Posted on May 7, 2014 by peterstone

The latest on sortition from Italy. Not sure I see the advantage of having the head of state selected by sortition, and equally unsure why it should be so important to exclude anyone from the draw for such a (largely ceremonial and apolitical) post. More consideration of these topics seems appropriate.

http://www.internauta-online.com/2014/04/sortition-will-have-to-wait-for-a-great-leader-who-will-renege-the-ballot-democracy/

Filed under: Applications, Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Democratic accountability, part 2

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 describes what “democratic accountability theory” is.

“Accountability” has a generalized positive connotation. Surely it is better when power is held accountable than when it is unaccountable or arbitrary. Scratching the surface, however, various considerations make it evident that the appeal of “electoral accountability” is illusory.

First, an “accountable government” is presumably self-evidently superior to an “unaccountable government” whose mandate is permanent and therefore cannot be replaced. But the charm of accountability seems less clear when the alternative is a different “unaccountable” government – a government whose mandate is temporary and cannot be renewed. If elections are the only method of accountability then such a limited mandate government is not accountable either. Accountability, it turns out, is not about replacing government any more than it is about permanent government. For some reason, a government must be re-electable to be “accountable”. It is the ability to award the prize of re-election that makes a government electorally accountable. If a prize cannot be awarded, or cannot be withdrawn, the spell of accountability is nullified.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: Accountability, accountable government, democratic accountability, electoral accountability | 210 Comments »

Benet Brandreth proposes selecting the legislature by lot

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Yoram Gat

In a 13 minute speech on BBC Channel 4 radio,

Benet Brandreth argues that our current political discourse is bankrupt, so he proposes a novel solution: a legislature by lot.

Below is my summarized transcript of Brandreth’s talk:

Important things are difficult to understand. They can’t be debated using Facebook comments. They require thought, consideration, research.
Political rhetoric is no longer about persuasion or debate of the issues but cheerleading. This is a symptom and a cause of a fundamental failing of our system of democracy.
The politician doesn’t wish to persuade people but to say something that is pleasing.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | 29 Comments »

Democratic accountability, part 1

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Yoram Gat

“Democratic accountability” seems to be an invention of the last 50 years.

It is one more ideological maneuver in the centuries old intellectual effort of aligning an ideology propounding political equality with support for the oligarchical practice of elections.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Participation, Theory | 14 Comments »